EVOLVE | STRATEGIES
4
THE COMPLICATEDNESS
TRAP
n 1955, businesses typically committed to between four and seven performance imperatives. Today they commit to between 25 and 40. The Boston Consulting Group Complexity Index shows that business complexity has gone up six-fold in the last 60 years. Contemporarily, organizational complexity (meaning the number of structures, processes, committees and systems) has seen a 35-fold increase.
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Though they attempt to respond to increasingly complex performance targets, new organizational labyrinths make it harder to improve productivity and promote innovation, causing demotivation and poor involvement in collaborators. However, it is not necessary to apply “hard” solutions to manage complexity, such as adding new processes, new systems, new structures and KPIs according to traditional methods of business organization. Nor do you need “soft” solutions such as team building, networking events and activities aimed at improving interpersonal relationships. Both of these approaches seek to achieve control, while in reality they make organizations more complicated* and unable to manage the complexity at hand. What is needed is a reduction of direct control, an increase in flexibility and autonomy and the reduction of systems. In short, leveraging the intelligence of people.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO MANAGE COMPLEXITY WITHOUT GETTING COMPLICATED, WE ANALYZED THE WORK OF YVES MORIEUX, DIRECTOR OF THE BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP’S INSTITUTE FOR ORGANIZATION. AND WE DISCOVERED THE SIX RULES THAT HELP REDUCE BUREAUCRACY WHILE INCREASING COOPERATION AND ENGAGEMENT. N° 5 - APRIL 2020
